By Glenn Dixon

get the ebook

          CHAPTER NINE

           See You at Machu Picchu

Mount Veronica rises up almost 6000 meters above the central highlands of Peru. Its snow-capped peaks hover above the clouds, pushing at the cold blue of the sky.  In the ancient language of the Inca, the mountain is called Waka Wilkay, which translates, roughly, as ‘the Tears of Heaven.’

And these Incas were on to something because, true enough, when the equatorial sun flashes off the high glaciers, fat tears of ice-water plop down onto the black rocks of the mountain top.  Trickles of water thread down the slopes, tumbling and combining into creeks.  And eventually, these same bubbling streams, a thousand kilometers to the west, swell into the mighty Amazon. 

We passed over one of these creeks up around 4000 meters.  A rickety bridge bent out over the water and I stopped for a moment, breathing heavily in the thin air.  It was our second day on the Inca trail – a four day march over the high Andes to the lost city of Machu Picchu. 

Behind me, I could hear the porters coming, the slap of their sandals on the rocky trail.  They were a pretty rough crowd these guys.  Their faces were weathered and toothless but they scurried up the pathways with huge striped grain sacks tied to their backs with rope.  In the sacks were our tents and the camp stove, and all the food for the journey.

Besides the porters there were nine of us.  Two Israelis, six Poles, a British girl and myself.  Oh, and a guide named René Huaman Callañaúpa.  The last two names are Quechua, the language of the Incas.  I asked him about the ‘René’ bit but he just smiled and told me simply that his mother had liked the sound of it.  It might have come from a French archeological team.  A long time ago.  He wasn’t saying.   

René was forty or maybe fifty, it was hard to tell.  He wore a baseball cap pulled down tight over his eyes.  And when he turned into the wind, looking down over the mountain passes, I could see his Inca ancestry.  He had the hooked nose and the high cheekbones of the Inca – just like the porters -– although René had had the good fortune to be born in a valley town rather than the high mountains.  And so, unlike the porters, he’d had a chance to go to school, to become educated and worldly. 

René spoke Spanish as well as Quechua.  His English too was quite good and after having guided treks through the Andes for a couple of decades he could let fly with smatterings of Italian and Japanese and even a few phrases in Polish which never failed to send our own Polish contingent off into fits of astonished laughter.

I can’t say that there was a whole lot of time for talking on the trail though.  We were pushing up to Dead Woman’s Pass and at 4200 meters we were sucking for air.  My own pack felt heavy although I knew it was lighter than what the porters had to deal with.  I had a couple of liters of water, a sleeping bag and a tumble of warm clothes but it all seemed to be dragging me down.  The straps were cutting into the soft flesh between my shoulder blades and my neck, and it didn’t seem like my walking stick, clacking on the stones, was of any real help at all.  

I stepped aside at the bridge and three of our porters bounded past, running at a light jog, their cheeks puffed up with coca leaves.  To chew coca is to be a Runa – one of the people of the Andes.  It is both an anesthetic and a medicine and, of course, the same plant from which cocaine is derived.  René, only the night before, in the dinner tent, had told us about the pits in the jungle, about the incredible quantity of coca leaves it takes to create a teaspoon of cocaine and, as we sat long into the evening listening to him, he spun up tales of government corruption, of presidential planes loaded with the stuff.  Of murders and the CIA and international espionage.   

For our simple porters, though, these coca leaves were an age-old tradition.  They provided minerals and nutrients that were not found in the corn and bean crops of the high mountains.  The leaves, it turns out, contain large amounts of calcium.  They also have various catalysts that help to break down hydrocarbons such as the very ones found in corn and beans.  And besides the nutritional benefits, these coca leaves have quasi-medical properties. They dull hunger and alleviate fatigue and so, our porters chewed the leaves relentlessly. 

They boiled up warm cups of the stuff in the morning.  They made it into a sort of tea and just after dawn - at about six – there would be a tap on our tent poles, and rough brown hands would push in the cups of coca tea.  We drank it gratefully.  It didn’t taste all that great but it sure got us going.   

***

A Swedish group was moving along behind us on the trail.  We’d already bumped into them once or twice. One of the guys wore huge black loafers on his feet.  “Comfortable,” he said, looking with disdain at my thick hiking boots.  “I got them two sizes too big.”  He grinned like a kid and I thought, ‘What is this guy on?’ 

“They are big,” he explained, “so they won’t give me... ah...”

“Blisters?”

“Yah, blisters.”

His face, I noticed, alternated, at different times of the day, between a blushing red and a sickly white.  By the second day we knew why. He was drinking incessantly.  I don’t quite know where he got the alcohol.  It’s possible that he’d secreted it all away in his pack but by mid afternoon, he was plainly drunk and he raced along the trails trying to keep up with the porters, his big black shoes flapping and slapping around his feet.  Then, when the altitude and the prevailing hangover caught up with him again, he’d slow to a groaning shuffle.  The other Swedes tsk-tsked him but he became a sort of landmark on the trail.  You could almost tell time by his states of inebriation.

We’d already gone a couple of days without showers and two nights with bone chilling temperature drops.  René explained that the trail we were now following was probably a route of pilgrimage, a sort of sacred journey from Cusco, some one hundred kilometers to the west.  We still had another twenty five kilometers to hike to Machu Picchu but just beneath the second high pass we came to the first set of Inca ruins.  It was both a guard post, René said, and a tumba – a resting point for the pilgrims.

This network of flagstone roads that we were on was dotted with such rest points. The road itself was one of the hallmarks of the Inca Empire.  These roads – 25,000 kilometers of them - wound through the high Andes like strings of thread.  They ran from what is now Columbia down through Ecuador, Peru, Chile and even a little ways into Argentina connecting the furthest outposts of the Inca Empire.

I should say here that Inca isn’t really the right word at all.  The word Inca actually refers only to the ruler, a god like figure not unlike an Egyptian pharoah.  He was always a direct descendent of the first leader of these people, the Inca Manco Capac. 

Names are tenuous things.  Of all the bits and pieces of language, they are the words that are most completely social constructions.  They are words that we have agreed upon.  Symbols that refer to a very specific person or place.

The people here – what we call Inca - are properly called, Runa, and their language Runasimi – the people’s mouth – we usually label Quechua.  René himself called the language Quechua.  He’d been born not far from here, in the little village of Chinchero not far from Cusco and, as we talked about Quechua, he had some fun trying to get me to pronounce their famous glottal stops.  These are a sort of hiccup or gulp that turn up in the middle of some of the Quechua words.  Words like q’inko which means to zig-zag (where the apostrophe marks the glottal stop).  I’d asked René about it when I noticed that the porters didn’t usually run straight up the stone steps on the trail instead performing a series of miniature switch backs, zig-zagging up the steepest of the long steps.

Some words in Quechua even have a double glottal stop and René tossed off a few of these, sounding as if he were downing a pint of beer all in one go.  And he taught me one hell of a word - huacunaillaihuanhuagracacunacayarcanchu – which means “Bulls get hungry without grass.”

Quechua, like many of the indigenous languages of the Americas, is an agglutinating language.  It tacks on word ending after word ending until a single word can become a whole sentence.  Sentences about bulls eating grass, for example.  Not that there were any bulls on the Inca trail. There were Llamas here but no bulls.  Nor was there much in the way of grass.  Just a sort of dull shrubbery you find above the tree line in the high mountain passes.

The Inca, though, were masters of this landscape.  And the Empire, or what is properly called the Tawantinsuyu, centred itself in these mountain ranges bounded on the west by the Pacific Ocean and to the East by the vast Amazon jungle.  Tawantinsuyu derives from the word Tawa which is the number ‘four.’  It meant that there were four provinces radiating out from Cusco, the capital city, like a cross.  The suffix ntin means ‘together’ and it’s followed by another suffix suyu meaning ‘region’ or ‘province.’   And so, the word Tawantinsuyu means something like “the Four United Provinces.” 

At any rate, this empire – the Tawantinsuyu – lasted less than a century.  By about 1450, the ninth Inca, Pachacuti the Earth Shaker, had finally managed to unite the separate tribes of the Andes into one cohesive republic.  By 1532, though, the Spanish arrived, just in time to witness a civil war between two of the great grandsons of Pachacuti. There was a terrific power struggle between Huascar (meaning ‘Gentle Hummingbird’) and Atahualpa (meaning ‘Heroic turkey’ - they did have great names, didn’t they?).  Predictably, the heroic turkey trumped the gentle hummingbird, but the whole royal mess left the empire in confusion.  And this was the state things were in when the Spanish arrived. 

The conquistadors, of course, saw their advantage and, with a kidnapping here, and a murder there, the whole Inca Empire collapsed within a single generation.  They  call this time the Yawar Cocha – the ocean of blood.  And, for them, the world would never be the same.

***

The Swedish guy was walking slowly in the morning.  He was wearing his white face and we passed him up beyond the ruins.  He gave us a weak grin and I said “See you at Machu Picchu.”  It was to become, literally, a running joke, and when he passed us again later – revved up again on the sauce - he called out the same thing, “See you at Machu Picchu.”  Inevitably a few hours later we passed him once more and threw the same taunt back at him.

At the top of the high pass, René gathered us together.  We were able now to look down upon a small set of ruins – a tumba – below us.  “What do you see there?” asked René.  We had already become familiar with this game. 

At the first pass - Dead Woman’s Pass - René had stopped us to point out the rock formation that supposedly made up the Dead Woman.  It looked like any other clump of rocks. The only clearly recognizable feature was a mound of rock with a tiny spur on top of it – what René claimed was the poor woman’s breast.  “Look up from there,” he had said. “Do you see her shoulder?  Look, there’s her chin and her face above it.”

We couldn’t see anything.  Tomir, the Israeli, delighted in at least seeing her breast and later, because this happened a lot – this stopping to see shapes in the rocks - Tomir took to seeing breasts in everything and when René asked us what we saw at the ruins down below us, Tomir offered up timidly that it could again be a breast. 

“No, it’s not a breast.” René was a bit indignant.  “Use your imagination.”

“The walls are in kind of a mushroom shape,” I said as the outer walls of the ruins did indeed form a semi circle with a hallway coming out from the bottom.

“No,” René turned slowly from Tomir to me.  “But you’re closer.  Look,” he paused again, sweeping his arm toward the ruins.  “These ruins are in the shape of a ceremonial knife.  The blade is the half circle.  The handle comes out of it.”

“I still see a breast,” whispered Tomir but his girlfriend shushed him. 

“In Quechua, a ceremonial knife is a tumi so the whole thing down there might be a sort of, what do you call it... a pun.  It’s a tumba and a tumi.”  René chuckled.  “The Inca, you see, often made their buildings into certain shapes.  Back in Cusco did you see...?”

I nodded.  The entire city had been planned in the shape of a Puma, the mountain lion of the Andes.  You could see it in the aerial photos.  They had postcards of it, outlined in black to make it clear for us gringos, but it was true.  The whole town, the capital of the Inca Empire, had a street plan in the shape of a crouching Puma. 

At Ollantaytambo, another town in the Sacred Valley, the street plan approximated the shape of a Llama.  And Machu Picchu, still some two days away, had at its centre a rock and wall formation in the shape of a Condor.  These were giant symbols the size of whole cities.

Symbols are funny things.  Sometimes, we physically construct them – like building a whole city to represent an animal.  That’s a pretty big metaphor.  Words are much smaller but we build them too.  They are socially constructed by which I mean that the society as a whole has generally agreed that such and such a symbol will represent such and such a meaning.  That’s largely how it works.  And it’s not surprising that we take our symbols from the world around us.  A condor for example just happens to be a magnificent bird – a huge raptor – and it happens to be native to the Andes Mountains.  It was only natural that the Inca would take something like that and affix it with a meaning. 

And so, the environment plays a part in the construction of our thinking too.   We can only work with the materials we have at hand and that’s the world immediately around us.  For the Inca, this was largely a mountain world.  A rarefied world of snowbound peaks and high alpine meadows.

***

At the height of the Inca Empire, just before the Spanish arrived, the cities and towns held about 15 million people.  And today, still, there are almost eight million people who are fully bilingual in both Spanish and Quechua.  Quechua is not generally taught in the schools - though it is quite often the language of the home and the street in places like Cusco.  In the high mountains there are still some two million people who speak nothing but the old Quechua language.

It’s often pointed out that the Incas never developed a writing system but that’s kind of missing the point.  There was an almost constant attention to symbols and messages.  This was a complex world and it was necessary to capture some of that complexity.   

The most famous symbolic system of the Inca was the Quipos, a series of knots tied onto thick wool strings.  They’re little understood, even by the modern Quechua, but it’s clear that they were some sort of system of record keeping.  There are only a few examples left and the anthropologists and historians fight over them with relish.  One recent paper claims that they might have stood in for syllables – something like hieroglyphics – but that’s probably a bit of a stretch.  More likely, they were an accounting system, though one that could hold a great deal of information.  When I asked René about them, he told me that the colour of the yarn had something to do with it.  The knots in yellow yarn signified gold and these Quipos were used to keep track of wealth.   Red yarn, meanwhile, was used to count soldiers – and possibly workers - to figure out where they were situated across the long kingdom.

We also know that these Quipos followed a base ten counting system, much like our own, but beyond that, not much is known about them.  What is clear is that they formed a system of representation not unlike a written language. They held information quite effectively and, certainly in an empire of this size, there would have been a lot of information to hold.  This was no back-water empire and, if not for the strange quirk of history that had the Spanish conquistadors slamming into their midst before the civilization really solidified... well, it’s hard to say what they might have accomplished and what they might have become.

***

“Let me tell you now about the Inca world view,” René said.  We huddled into him a little more closely.  A wind had come down off the mountain top and our sweaters fluttered under the straps of our backpacks.  We were near the top of the second high pass and the full sweep of the Andes lay in front of us. 

“Do you know why Machu Picchu is represented by the Condor?”  René looked around at us.  No one would meet his eyes.  No one had a clue.

“Because the Condor, for us, represents the upper world.”  René stopped for a moment, obviously considering how he would explain all this to us.  “There were three worlds.  Did you see in the last set of ruins, the steps...?  Three steps going up.  This is for the three worlds.”

“Look,” he said, waving his hands out across the valleys below us.  “The lower world was called Uju Pacha.  It is represented by the snake.  When we get to Machu Picchu you will see the river far below it.  The Urubamba river.  It winds like a snake so that the snake is both the symbol for the underworld and the symbol for water.”

The wind whistled across the rocks.  René looked up.  “This all around us, this is the middle world.  Kay Pacha.  It is represented by the Puma - symbol of the earth and also the symbol of war.  Cusco was the middle place of all things and that’s why it was built in the shape of a Puma.

René waved us in closer.  “But most important is the Condor.  Have you seen them?  A few of the group nodded.  In Colca Canyon to the south you can sometimes see them riding the thermals.  Huge birds of prey, they are in the same family as eagles or hawks although they are considerably larger and, until recently, nearly extinct.

“The condors are the keepers of the upper world. The Hanac Pacha. The Condor represents the air, the sky... also peace.”  René paused dramatically.  “We believe that if you have lived a good life, then you will have a pure spirit.  This we call a chuya alma or sometimes an ura almo, which means ‘white spirit.’  And when you die, if you have this pure spirit, then a condor will come for your spirit and take it up to Hanaq Pacha.

“Like Heaven,” offered one of the Poles.

“A little bit, yes, but not quite the same.”  René looked up at the rain-darkened sky.  “It’s a little complicated to explain.”

Just then the Swede appeared from below to break the spell.  He’d found his second wind or his second bottle and he breezed past us, hopping from rock to rock.  “See you at Machu Picchu,” he laughed, and then he was gone.

***

Our campsite that night was cold.  We were still up above 4000 meters and the stars glittered and sparkled like living things.  The crescent moon hung oddly horizontal like a thin smile and René tried to point out a few of the old Inca constellations.  Up in the Pleiades was Colcas, the Puma’s head, a seven star grouping.

“Do you see it?”

Tomir was about to say something but his girlfriend’s hand hooked into his arm and he only gave a soft squeal.  Another constellation formed the shape of a Llama.  These animal symbols were everywhere.

René turned to the south.  “Okay, what about up there?”  I looked and something now familiar formed in my imagination.  We were thirteen degrees south of the equator and there it was again.

“That’s the Southern Cross,” I said, quite proud of myself.

“Yes.  In Quechua it is Chacanu.  It is like a roadmap for us.”  René pointed up into the sky. “Cusco is at the centre, always at the center, and the four arms of the cross point out to the different regions.  The four provinces of the Empire. 

What amazed me is how these patterns of stars were given meaning by people around the world. That’s to be expected, I guess.  The stars are pretty clear to everyone on earth  And it goes without saying that, for the Spanish conquistadors, the Cross had a most particular meaning.  So the fact that the Inca already recognized it as a powerful symbol only meant that things were about to get very interesting.   

***

The great cathedral in Cusco is built directly over the palace of the eighth Inca ruler, the Inca Wirachocha.  There are a lot of reasons for this.  The first is that it was practical.  The stout and expertly crafted Inca foundation walls proved to hold up well in the face of earthquakes.  The Inca walls are famous for their craftsmanship.  They didn’t use mortar but the stones were so perfectly fitted together that it is impossible to slip a knife blade between any of the joints.  In the early years of the conquest, the Spanish experienced a number of minor earthquakes and watched as their own buildings collapsed – while the old Inca walls stood up unscathed.  It didn’t take them too long to realize that they could incorporate the Inca walls as foundations.

But, building the Cathedral – and a beautiful cathedral it is – directly over the Inca ruler’s palace was more than a structural decision.  The Spanish, of course, were making a statement.  And the statement was this:  “We are more powerful than you... or, more precisely, our god is more powerful than yours.”   

There were actually many layers of subtle logic at play.  The Inca Rulers were thought to have descended from the Sun God.  And when they ascended to the throne, these rulers each took a new name (much as the Pope does today).  The eighth Inca – and the most powerful in all the line of rulers – chose the name Wirachocha.  Wirachocha just happens to be the name of one of the most ancient of the Inca gods.  A god that is sometimes called ‘the invisible one.’ 

This god was a sort of supreme deity of pre-Inca origin.  And because it’s a pre-Inca borrowing, the stories ascribed to this god are not completely clear.  Some stories talk of him as a sort of combination Storm God and Sun God while others claim that he was responsible for creating the sun and the moon.  A number of different myths are associated with this Wirachocha but most of them have him roaming the earth disguised as a beggar to check on his creations.  Most of them say that he weeps copiously and some stories say that he has used these oceans of tears to flood out the creations he doesn’t like.  Sound familiar?   A flood wiping out creation?

And how about this:  The god Wiracocha eventually disappeared one day, out over the Pacific Ocean where he was seen walking on the water.  Walking on water!  I can’t imagine that some of the Spanish priests didn’t have a real “Aha” moment at the sound of that story. 

These were just the sort of levers that the Spanish were able to put to use in their conversion of the Inca to the Catholic Church.  The most important point of all, though, was the one René had just told us about.  The chuya alma - the white soul – and the idea.  that when one died, a person’s chuya alma would be carried off to another world above us.

***

On the fourth and last day of the hike, we woke up bloody early.  It was about 4:00 a.m. when there was a rustling outside our tent.  René appeared, urging us to hurry.  The idea was that we had to get to the Sun Gate to see the sun come up over Machu Picchu.  The Sun Gate was still some two kilometers away from our campsite but already the sky was growing lighter in the east and we pulled on our hiking boots, bleary eyed and heavy with sleep.

Just below our campsite our group, as well as the Swedish group, were joined by a troop of over-enthusiastic Australians and Americans.  I don’t know where they came from but we all jostled together and the final push to Sun Gate had suddenly turned very competitive. 

We jogged along in single file, our heavy backpacks jumping up and down on our backs.  If anyone slowed down, even for a second, five or six others would push by them.  It was crowded.  And no one was showing very much in the way of manners. 

After being pushed along for sometime at this rate, I looked down and realized that one of my bootlaces had come undone.  I was damned if I was going to stop though.  Sweat was now trickling down my neck and adrenaline was coursing through my system. I managed to get my water bottle out even as I charged along the path.  I took a gulp then realized that my other bootlace was loose.  The laces now were flapping spastically, shamefully, and my boots were pulling away from my socks.

The path carved along a cliff face.  We were going up and down long sets of uneven rock steps.  The cliff plunged down to my right and gradually, through the morning fog, it dawned on me that I could easily trip over these flapping laces.  I could fall headlong off the cliff and so, at last, cold hard reason rose to the surface and I had to stop to tie up my boots. I grunted menacingly at those who scrambled by me.  The Swedish guy sprinted past.  “See you at Machu Picchu,” he twirped. 

“Like hell you will,” I hissed back beneath my breath.  As I stood up though, it dawned on me that the clouds were pretty much socked in anyway.  And a half hour later, when I tumbled into a set of rock ruins, it took me a moment to realize that I was at the fabled Sun Gate.  Only a few people had stopped there to take token photographs.  There was really nothing to see at all.  An immense cloud had settled all around us.  Somewhere just below us lay Machu Picchu but we could’ve been on London Bridge for all I knew.

The pace slowed – a lot – though as we descended further, wisps here and there opened in the clouds and the knifing peak behind the city – Huayna Picchu – began to appear.  And then, to our left, a stonewall materialized out of the fog.   Down the hills, the stepped terraces came into view and, at last, at last... the whole magical city appeared as if someone had suddenly wiped the condensation off a window in front of us. 

So, how do you describe something as iconic as Machu Picchu?  Who hasn’t, at one time or another, had a postcard of it magnetically affixed to their fridge?  Who hasn’t penciled in the name on their list of the must-see sights of the world?  It’s like the Eiffel Tower or the pyramids of Egypt and as the sun glinted down on it – the real thing – standing stonily silent on the mountaintop, I couldn’t believe that I was really here.

***

 

We were significantly lower now. Machu Picchu sits at 2800 meters above sea level and finally we were getting a break from the punishing altitude.  What balanced that was that by about 7:00 a.m. the sun was already slamming down on us with an intensity I hadn’t felt since I’d first arrived in South America.  Basically, we were only a few hundred kilometers south of the equator and the screaming sun was not about to let us forget it.

René tucked his baseball cap even further down his forehead.  He led us down through the green eastern terraces.  Some three thousand people had once lived here but, clearly, the agricultural output of the place was for a population much greater than that.  “Every guide will tell you something different,” René told us.  “There are a lot of theories about this place but the truth is that we really don’t know much about Machu Picchu.  Up until quite recently, it was thought that this might have been a secret refuge for the Inca rulers.  The Spanish never knew about Machu Picchu and so everyone imagined that the noble classes of Cusco came up here and lived for many more generations, untouched by the conquest.”

“But, that’s simply not true.  The scientists now say that this place was already abandoned by the time the Spanish showed up.  We don’t know why.  Our best guess is that things tightened up during the civil wars and everyone who lived here fled back to Cusco.”

“What we do know is that this place was a religious centre and, come, I will show you why that is so.”

He led us down a set of precipitous steps.  The city now climbed up above us, a tumble of terraces and rockwalls.  We came down to a ledge with a cave opening.  It looked, though, as if it had been artificially widened and enlarged over the years and, in the middle of it, was a set of three steps.  They didn’t lead anywhere.  Just up in to the air.

René stopped in front of them.  “What do you think these are?” he asked.

It was clear by now.  The three steps.  The three levels.  “Here,” René said, “you can see the three worlds of the Inca, the Uju Pacha, the Kay Pacha and the Hanac Pacha.  Now come, I want to show you something more.”

He led us up another stairway and we came into an amphitheatre in the rock.  Most of it was left in its natural form and two great swirls of rock, the result of some cataclysmic geological event, spread out like frozen drapery.

“Do you see,” René said, “these are its wings.”

“Wings?”

In the middle of the swirling rock, a small carving was set into the floor.  It was hard to make out.  “This is its head.  Do you see?”

I squinted and then stepped back for a fuller picture.  It took some imagination but there it was. 

“This is the Condor.” René spoke proudly now.  “This whole place is a temple to the Hanac Pacha, the upper world.  The Inca trail we have just walked was most likely a spiritual pilgrimage, a holy journey for the people of Cusco.  Maybe a way of purifying their spirits, a way of strengthening their chuya alma so that when they died, the condor would come for them and raise them up into the sky.”

René took us to the upper terraces of Machu Picchu after that.  To the Temple of the Sun where the rays on the summer solstice angle in though one of its windows.  He took us to two small circular stone circles.  What at first were thought to be places for grinding grain, instead turned out to be tiny reflecting pools.  They were filled with water though the water was not for drinking.  Nor was it strictly decorative.  The thought is now that, in these still pools of water, the Inca priests observed the stars.  They used them as unmoving mirrors to track the movement of the constellations and planets. 

“We can’t know for sure.  Most of this knowledge is lost.  Machu Picchu,” René explained, “was re-discovered only in 1911 by an American by the name of Hiram Bingham. The Quechua who lived around here always knew of the ruins up on the mountain.  The city had long since been covered in vegetation but the farmers who worked the land along the river knew that there were ruins up here.  It didn’t take much for them to point Mr. Bingham and his expedition up to the trails across the ridge.” 

René looked at his watch.  Our trip was coming to an end.  “I want to tell you, though, before we part... that I am Quechua.  The truth, today, is that this is a very mixed up thing.  We say sometimes we are Quechañol – a mixture of Quechua and Español – Spanish.  But I am proud of this past.  Every time I see this city I am proud of what my ancestors did.  I will leave you with the three obligations of the Inca Way.  These are the things you must do if you are to have a pure soul.  You must work hard and this we call yankay.  You must love and this we call munay, and lastly you must always keep learning.  The word for this is yachay,” René looked at us hard. “You must always keep learning.”